Pangea-era rift makes East Coast perfect for carbon storage

Flood basalts left over from the breakup of Pangea, which can chemically …

As the years tick by with most of the planet doing little in the way of reducing carbon emissions, researchers are getting increasingly serious about the possibility of carbon sequestration. If it looks like we're going to be burning coal for decades, carbon sequestration offers us the best chance of limiting its impact on climate change and ocean acidification. A paper that will appear in today's PNAS describes a fantastic resource for carbon sequestration that happens to be located right next to many of the US' major urban centers on the East Coast.

Assuming that capturing the carbon dioxide is financially and energetically feasible, the big concern becomes where to put it so that it will stay out of the atmosphere for centuries. There appear to be two main schools of thought here. One is that areas that hold large deposits of natural gas should be able to trap other gasses for the long term. The one concern here is that, unlike natural gas, CO2 readily dissolves in water, and may escape via groundwater that flows through these features. The alternative approach turns that problem into a virtue: dissolved CO2 can react with minerals in rocks called basalts (the product of major volcanic activity), forming insoluble carbonate minerals. This should provide an irreversible chemical sequestration.

The new paper helpfully points out that if we're looking for basalts, the East Coast of the US, home to many of its major urban centers and their associated carbon emissions, has an embarrassment of riches. The rifting that broke up the supercontinent called Pangea and formed the Atlantic Ocean's basin triggered some massive basalt flows at the time, which are now part of the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province, or CAMP. The authors estimate that prior to some erosion, CAMP had the equivalent of the largest basalt flows we're currently aware of, the Siberian and Deccan Traps.

Some of this basalt is on land—anyone in northern Manhattan can look across the Hudson River and see it in the sheer cliffs of the Palisades. But much, much more of it is off the coast under the Atlantic Ocean. The authors provide some evidence in the form of drill cores and seismic readings that indicate there are large basalt deposits in basins offshore of New Jersey and New York, extending up to southern New England.

These areas are now covered with millions of years of sediment, which should provide a largely impermeable barrier that will trap any gas injected into the basalt for many years. The deposits should also have reached equilibrium with the seawater above, which will provide the water necessary for the chemical reactions that precipitate out carbonate minerals.

Using a drill core from an onshore deposit, the authors show that the basalt deposits are also composed of many distinct flows of material. Each of these flows would have undergone rapid cooling on both its upper and lower surface, which fragmented the rock. The core samples show porosity levels between 10 and 20 percent, which should allow any CO2 pumped into the deposits to spread widely.

The authors estimate that New Jersey's Sandy Hook basin, a relatively small deposit, is sufficient to house 40 years' worth of emissions from coal plants that produce 4GW of electricity. And the Sandy Hook basin is dwarfed by one that lies off the Carolinas and Georgia. They estimate that the South Georgia Rift basin covers roughly 40,000 square kilometers.

The authors argue that although laboratory simulations suggest the basic idea of using basalts for carbon sequestration is sound, the actual effectiveness in a given region can depend on local quirks of geology, so pilot tests in the field are absolutely essential for determining whether a given deposit is suitable. So far, only one small-scale test has been performed on any of the CAMP deposits.

Given the area's proximity to significant sources of CO2 and the infrastructure that could be brought into play if full-scale sequestration is attempted, it seems like one of the most promising proposals to date.

Tree is the answer actually, but too bad we don't eat tree for foods. What that mean is, we don't want to live in East coast, too cold, nor in the West coast, too hot. We ended up nowhere else to live.

Originally posted by Zoyx:There is another ice age coming within 10,000 years...

What makes you think that?

quote:

Originally posted by DogEars:Did they find a good place to store all that excess water vapor yet?

Sure CO2 is a more efficient greenhouse gas than water vapor when they are in equal quantities, but they aren't, not even close.

Maybe they should take that excess CO2 they want to bury and use it to stimulate plant growth so we can help feed people that don't have enough.

Water vapor concentration in the atmosphere is largely dependent on temperature. If you somehow "removed" significant quantities the water cycle would make it right back up. This happens naturally as the lifetime of water molecules in the atmosphere is measurable in days whereas CO2, being more stable and part of a slower cycle, can remain for a century or more, and what's more it's CO2 emissions from buried hydrocarbons (i.e. fossil fuels) that we can actually control. So water vapor is enormous important in the short term while CO2 concentration is enormously important in the long term. The only way to even use water vapor to control the climate is by trying to manipulate its reflectance to bounce more solar energy away from parts of the surface with a low albedo (the oceans, for example). This carries its own problems, though, as the basis of the food chain (not to mention natural CO2 scrubbers) like phytoplankton and crops depend on sunlight and plenty of it.

"Burning Coal kills and sickens hundreds of millions worldwide every year with its toxic radioactive emissions. CO2 sequestration just continues the murder."

There are, what, call it 6.5 billion people on earth. At a lifespan of 65 each this means (steady state approximation, but we just want rough numbers here) that means a hundred million would die each year. So what you are claiming is (a) more deaths occur from burning coal than are actually measured world-wide. Wow!(b) if we just stopped burning coal no-one would ever die again? Double wow!!

...........

"Maybe they should take that excess CO2 they want to bury and use it to stimulate plant growth so we can help feed people that don't have enough."

There is this thing called science, you know. And science(TM) has actually investigated this claim and found it wanting. Theory suggests that it is other nutrients (primarily nitrogen, phosphorous and, in the oceans, iron) that limit plant growth, not CO2. Experiments (in the real world, with real plants) confirm this hypothesis.

..........

It's normal for a CO2 post to bring out the crazies, but this level of crazy goes above and beyond your usual "Obama wants to turns us all into communist robots" political nonsense.

Originally posted by Zoyx:The perfect sink is the one that allows you to turn around and release CO2 when you need some heat. There is another ice age coming within 10,000 years... some extra CO2 could come in handy then.

James Hansen computes that a single CFC plant produces enough of a greenhouse effect to counteract the cooling effect of the Earth's increasing eccentricity and axial tilt (known as the Milankovich cycle, we're currently progressing through both in such a way that the Earth's climate should be slowly cooling, but due to anthropogenic influences, we are stalling that natural trend).

That being said, I agree. For me, the optimal strategy would be to sequester the excess CO2 in the atmosphere so that it can later be easily redeployed here on Earth (or indeed elsewhere in the solar system, should we decide to terraform Mars or something) for climate control purposes. If we sequester all the excess CO2 into porous rock beds, we'll have a hell of a hard time getting it back into the atmosphere in the event that we need it a few hundred years down the road.

Also, while sethdayal is engaging in a bit of hyperbole regarding the deaths due to coal pollution, he is sort of correct. Coal pollution is responsible for far more deaths and illnesses than nuclear power production.

Originally posted by DogEars:Did they find a good place to store all that excess water vapor yet?

Sure CO2 is a more efficient greenhouse gas than water vapor when they are in equal quantities, but they aren't, not even close.

Maybe they should take that excess CO2 they want to bury and use it to stimulate plant growth so we can help feed people that don't have enough.

Water vapor is a strong greenhouse gas, but its lifespan in the atmosphere is on the matter of weeks, versus the centuries or millennia that CO2 will hang around.

The problem of global hunger isn't a matter of production, it's a matter of distribution. There simply isn't enough of a profit motive to distribute to the poorest populations, nor is there enough of a private charity or government interest in doing it in large enough quantities either.

Look, not only is it greatly expensive, but putting CO2 underground simply means we have to dig up more oil for fuel. We have a BETTER place to put the CO2: INTO MAN MADE FUELS. Use the CO2 twice, at far less cost, then invest the difference in sequestration and create a cynclic system.

Fischer Tropche Systhesis is a process that's been used since before WWII to make fuel. Its a simple and proven chemical process that involves simply CO (from CO2), Water, and electricity.

Previously this has not been persued as it was fairly expensive (about $20-30 a gallon), and its was significantly energy negative (takes more energy to make fuel that you get from it, so without a clean unlimited energy supply, it was not a mass scale solution.

Thse issues have been resolved. 60 years of engineering have brought better recouperators, heat exchangers, symbiotic processes, better catalysts, and we can use extremely cheap off-peak wind energy to power it all.

Originally posted by Strabo: Coal pollution is responsible for far more deaths and illnesses than nuclear power production.

That's a pretty silly comparison considering nuclear power is the safest power source these days. The security measures developed since first generation reactors like the infamous Chernobyl have all but eliminated the possibility of a disaster. What I don't understand is the nuclear power phobia in the US. Energy lobbying groups selling their doom and gloom view of nuclear power for the past half century I'm sure.

Fischer Tropche Systhesis is a process that's been used since before WWII to make fuel. Its a simple and proven chemical process that involves simply CO (from CO2), Water, and electricity.

Previously this has not been persued as it was fairly expensive (about $20-30 a gallon), and its was significantly energy negative (takes more energy to make fuel that you get from it, so without a clean unlimited energy supply, it was not a mass scale solution.

Thse issues have been resolved. 60 years of engineering have brought better recouperators, heat exchangers, symbiotic processes, better catalysts, and we can use extremely cheap off-peak wind energy to power it all.

I need no visit to that website or no data beyond what you have provided to know that what you say CANNOT be, without raping the laws of physics.

You can only get as much energy from CO2, or to water, for that matter, as you put into it. And that would be forgetting that growing enthropy makes it impossible to make the process 100% efficient.

If you use 1 Gigawatt hour to turn CO2 back into C + O2, you cannot get back any more than 1GWH. And where will that energy come from? Coal? Oil? Back to square one! And the machine that breaks the CO2 will waste part of that energy, anyway. There is NO perpetuum mobile.

Making your own fuels might be a good idea, as a way to store nuclear, wind, solar or sea power, though. Still, there are far better ways to store and release energy than synthesizing gasoline from CO2 and then burn it again in furnaces or explosion engines.

Zelanni has been warned repeatedly about shilling on Ars and here he is doing it again.

As Lobotomik points out ... Zelanni's claims are preposterous, we aren't going to use ELECTRICITY to reduce CO2 from the atmosphere, so that we can make a hydrocarbon fuel ... this is just f**king nuts.

World of duh ... use the electricity directly.

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As far as the article being discussed (by the non-crackpots) ... it's a perfectly reasonable article ... but as far as the real practicality of CO2 sequestration goes, this hardly answers the big issues. "4GW for 40 years" is basically four standard generating plants ... for 40 years. They state the particular deposit cited is relatively small, but the scale of the problem we are talking about on the east coast looks like 500+ GWe, perhaps 1000 GWe or more as the economy grows and we increasingly shift loads to electricity to "decarbonize" them.

We're talking about big pipelines going far out on the continental shelf pumping liquid CO2 down a lot of boreholes. Make any WAG you want about the costs to do this, it sure as hell wouldn't be cheap.

And then there's the fundamental problem capturing the CO2 from the combustion in the first place. That looks really expensive today, likely prohibitively expensive for post-combustion retrofits (IMHO) possibly bearable if the generating technology shifts to IGCC (integrated gasification with combined-cycle generation) and the CO2 is extracted from the gasification stage. This is thermodynamically much more efficient, both because the CO2 capture is more efficient, and because the combined-cycle power plant is far more efficient too.

This IGCC +CO2 capture is what "future-gen" was supposed to demonstrate ... but it's become "never gen" ... spiraling costs forced Bush to cancel it, Obama tired to revive it, and now it's a "zombie project" .... underfunded "living dead."

It's perfectly fair for the authors of the paper to point out that the Basalt repository is there and it would probably work ... but the idea that this is "problem solved" for CO2 or the coal industry is crazy.

Wind, solar and Nuclear power will all beat the hell out of CO2 sequestration on costs, and when you consider all the environmental damage coal mining does, WTF is anybody who is sane arguing for CO2 sequestration?

I am not associated with Doty Scientific and am not compensated in any way for my comments.

MODERATION:I gave you a polite request earlier this week that i see has been ignored. I've checked with another moderator, and these posts are considered spam under the Ars forum rules. Do it again, and you will be receiving a temp-ban from posting.

Originally posted by DogEars:Did they find a good place to store all that excess water vapor yet?

They're called "oceans" ... perhaps you have heard of them?

quote:

Sethdayal: Burning Coal kills and sickens hundreds of millions worldwide every year with its toxic radioactive emissions. CO2 sequestration just continues the murder.

Coal plants can all be replaced on site with nuclear power, paid for by and ending fossil fuel emissions within the next 10 years.

The idea that coal "kills & sickens hundreds of millions worldwide with it's toxic radioactive emissions" is really just f**king crazy on the face of it unless you have a very peculiar and subtle definition of "sickens." That mortality and morbidity would have killed off the human race.

Sethdayal, WHY THE F**K DO YOU KEEP POSTING UP SUCH WITLESS CRAP? Yeah, coal is a real problem but don't make up hyperbolic nonsense because anybody with any brains KNOWS you are blowing shit.

Now, as far as "Coal plants can all be replaced on site with nuclear power, paid for by and ending fossil fuel emissions within the next 10 years." That's f**king nuts too. You keep running around Ars shilling this moron crap. We cannot possibly replace all the coal fired power plants in the US with nuclear plants in the next 10 years. And sure as hell it wouldn't be "free" either.

Sethdayal is a whackjob-crazy who runs around Ars crapping threads with his "nuclear is the cure, and it's easy and free" enthusiasms, and we are probably going to hear from him about "Hyperion power" pretty soon.

Sethdayal's problem is that what he "knows" about nuclear power comes from novels like "The Hunt for Red October."

We have real problems, and these real problems will need real solutions, and that will take ... you-know, REALITY-based engineering and economic decisions. The raving whack-jobs just increase the level of delusionary noise.

Originally posted by thebubonicegg:That's a pretty silly comparison considering nuclear power is the safest power source these days.

Where is your evidence that nuclear power is safer than wind power or solar? I think it extremely unlikely that even ignoring nuclear reactor accidents this is true, for the whole life-cycle, uranium mining and waste disposal included.

quote:

The security measures developed since first generation reactors like the infamous Chernobyl have all but eliminated the possibility of a disaster.

Prove it. I think it is unfortunately obvious that you don't know your ass from a hole in the ground about nuclear reactors or their technology and safety issues, because the people who do don't make silly claims like this.

The first and most relevant fact is that none of the power reactors in the west (particularly none of the next-generation PWRs which might actually get licensed and built) have the intrinsic safety flaws that the reactor at Chernobyl had ... among them that the Chernobyl reactor had no containment vessel. But beyond that, the Chernobyl reactor had void-fraction reactivity problems which no western reactor would be permitted, and then of course there was the f**king idiot Xenon upset accident which was caused by violating all the operating procedures for said reactor, and aggravated by the fact that the control-rod response times were slow.

If you want to say honestly "we aren't so stupid and reckless as to design reactors like THAT" ... OK. But claiming "all but eliminated the possibility of a disaster?" Really? Prove it. That's damn hard to do. One of the major reasons it is hard to do is that people often do careless, reckless things, or have moments of terrible stupidity. It's very hard to build a system, any kind of system which is truly idiot-proof. How are you going to guarantee there won't be idiot moments?

A hell of a lot of work has gone into aircraft design and aviation safety, and aviation accidents and crashes still happen. Yes, because a reactor sits on the ground that does "simplify the problem" compared to aviation safety in many ways, but nuclear reactors have a whole set of safety issues of their own, and it's not all that simple.

quote:

What I don't understand is the nuclear power phobia in the US. Energy lobbying groups selling their doom and gloom view of nuclear power for the past half century I'm sure.

Oh really, you don't understand it? Psssst: Three Mile Island. Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS).

************

Why is it that any thread which has the word "CO2" or "climate" in it attracts all these morons and shills and whack-job advocates? And the embarrassing thing is that they are almost all male.

When my daughter was a seven year old she went around for a few weeks chanting "Girls go to college to get more knowledge, boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider." I pointed out to her that I'd gone to college for years and years, and taught at one now. My daughter looked at me like I was being dense and said "Dad, you're not a boy."

Look, boys ... "stop going to Jupiter." Wise up, get a grip, if you need a fantasy get a porno flick and beat off, but stop wasting everybody's time with dumb shit like this. I suppose I should be grateful that the 50+% female fraction of humanity has other things to waste their time on than this.

All I can say about Andrew is he has issues not the least his inability, to read, his tendancy to Tourettes, and his unbelievable background in every engineering profession. He claimed one time to be an engineer at Hanford - I know custodial at the McDonalds but still he was in town.

How about it Andrew are you advanced to the Grade 1 level yet at the Hooterville early adult education classes in reading and "rithmetic" cause this is going to challenging for you.

" increased air pollution due to coal-fired electricity generation and up to 668 premature deaths, 928 hospital admissions, 1,100 emergency room visits and 333,660 minor illnesses such as headaches, coughing and other respiratory symptoms, per year."

Ratioing 668 and 1000000 to 333660 we get 500M coal pollution related illnesss - some serious some not too.

For Andrews usual mindless blathering on the degree of toxicity of coal emissions.

We did the equivalent in switching gear to the World War IIproduction of war materials and with Roosevelts New Deal.

In 1941 America had a fractioon of todays industrial capacity producing 3.7M automobiles compared to 2007 America when America produced 10 million vehicles. In 1941 American tank production was almost zero and yet by 1945 we had produced 80000 tanks weighing in at 30 tons each. Auto production was essentially zero 1943 to 1945.

While perhaps only part of the solution, a total fossil fuel elimination with the hot tub size factory produced 30 Mwe Hyperion unit weighing in at about 15 tons illustrates the small amount of industrial capacity required. Two units - made almost 100% of steel with a few pounds of enriched uranium weigh about the same as 20 automobiles or a Sherman tank and are lot less complex. 50000 of them would be needed to convert American from fossils to nuclear about the equivalent of a half million vehicles - .5% of American's 2007 auto production per year for 10 years.

There is a lot of unemployed autoworkers and mothballed auto factories just waiting for orders.

Not a trivial thing certainly but well within our capacity. What would work best is a giant public national power authority like the Bonneville (Grand Coulee) Power Commission or TVA one time national technical and environment certifications - no lawyers allowed - charged with replacing all the nations coal plants efficiently on budget and on time just like Asian countries are doing.

Big nukes are 99% steel and concrete and today's much smaller units require about the same materials as a bridge or building. They can be largely mass produced in factories. Labor is a relatively small part of nuke cost but we sure have a lot of that available. With orders for 10000 nukes worldwide, colleges would have hundreds of thousand of graduates ready for the big push three or four years now the road.

My way:

10000 nukes worldwide costing $10 trillion is well within our industrial/financial capacity to build within the next ten years. It is paid for by and ends fossil fuel use, saves a million lives every year from toxic radioactive waste from coal plants and ends global warming. Reasoning Democrats (most I hope) and almost all Republicans and Deniers will go along with this at least part way as momentum builds.

Andrew's solution

Thirty years from now some new tech renewables we've been waiting for are now less than 10 times the cost of nuclear. Apparently attaching a microprocessor making them "smart" helps with the cost. Unfortunately, the "opinions" of those silly scientists were right and most of the worlds coastal cities are flooded, the gulf stream has stopped, billions are dead and starving from toxic radioactive coal plant emissions flooding and bad weather. Europe and eastern North America are frozen solid. Deniers and Republicians still refuse to spend on renewables because the treasury is empty feeding the starving, CO2 is plant food and we need lotsa that. The new age renewable "religion" with High Priest Al Gore wants to start culling humans because we produce too much CO2. Jesus and Mohammed have been seen walking together.

Originally posted by WeedleTheLiar:Ask and ye shall receive, finally some proposed solutions to Global Warming. Unfortunately this one seems to be literally sweeping the problem under a rug.

Am I the only one worried about the dangers of trying to terraform the planet that we all live on? How hard would it be to, say, overcompensate and knock us into an iceage?

Two things: we have extensive coverage of efficiency and renewable energy tech, both of which can serve as part of a portfolio of solutions to anthropogenic climate change. So, there's been all sorts of potential solutions that we've covered (we just tend not to label them as such to avoid the derangement that typically follows any mention of climate).

Second thing is that we're already terraforming the planet via our carbon emissions. The idea is to do so in a somewhat more intelligent manner than we have been.

I knew it... we'd get Sethdayal raving about "the Sethdayal plan" and Hyperion reactors, and quoting the Huffington Post ... that esteemed font of nuclear engineering knowledge.

quote:

We did the equivalent in switching gear to the World War IIproduction of war materials and with Roosevelts New Deal.

In 1941 America had a fractioon of todays industrial capacity producing 3.7M automobiles compared to 2007 America when America produced 10 million vehicles. In 1941 American tank production was almost zero and yet by 1945 we had produced 80000 tanks weighing in at 30 tons each. Auto production was essentially zero 1943 to 1945.

While perhaps only part of the solution, a total fossil fuel elimination with the hot tub size factory produced 30 Mwe Hyperion unit weighing in at about 15 tons illustrates the small amount of industrial capacity required. Two units - made almost 100% of steel with a few pounds of enriched uranium weigh about the same as 20 automobiles or a Sherman tank and are lot less complex. 50000 of them would be needed to convert American from fossils to nuclear about the equivalent of a half million vehicles - .5% of American's 2007 auto production per year for 10 years.

I'm not going to waste any more of Ar's storage or your page download rebutting this ... see this following post (same one I referenced above), which Sethdayal never bothered to answer, and which goes through the 'facts' he claims, and also points out that the Hyperion is vaporware now, depending on certificating a minature lead-bismuth cooled reactor, with no reasonable possibility of ever being licensed in the US, which Sethdayal actually acknowledged.

Originally posted by Dr. Jay:Two things: we have extensive coverage of efficiency and renewable energy tech, both of which can serve as part of a portfolio of solutions to anthropogenic climate change. So, there's been all sorts of potential solutions that we've covered (we just tend not to label them as such to avoid the derangement that typically follows any mention of climate).

I stand corrected, Ars does have pretty good coverage of emerging energy techs. I'm just glad to see them applied to the perceived problem at hand.

quote:

Second thing is that we're already terraforming the planet via our carbon emissions. The idea is to do so in a somewhat more intelligent manner than we have been.

The terraforming we've done up until now has been deemed, nearly unanimously, bad. No matter how good our intentions are there's no reason to think that any other tinkering we do will help our situation rather than hurt it. Our "intelligence" is what got us here in the first place.

Originally posted by WeedleTheLiar:The terraforming we've done up until now has been deemed, nearly unanimously, bad. No matter how good our intentions are there's no reason to think that any other tinkering we do will help our situation rather than hurt it. Our "intelligence" is what got us here in the first place.

Are you suggesting that the solution to thoughtless actions is more thoughtless action?

Originally posted by WeedleTheLiar:The terraforming we've done up until now has been deemed, nearly unanimously, bad. No matter how good our intentions are there's no reason to think that any other tinkering we do will help our situation rather than hurt it. Our "intelligence" is what got us here in the first place.

The "terraforming" we have done so far, is in the interest of this quarter's profits and not in any way related to attempts to help. For the most part "good intentions" are divorced from this process, greed is there instead.Intelligence, when used, has been how to increase profits more. Usually intelligence beyond "can't we just dump it in the river?" is not involved unless there are loop holes that need to be found.

Well Andrew this is better - you've got control of your Tourettes now and you've taken your beating well.

Actually, I was quoting Steven Kirsch writing at Huffpo who has an enviable record as a emgineering entrepenuer. Sad you were unable to get your remedial ed teacher to help you with that.

Yes under the current regulator regime small reactors are unlikely to get licensed in the US including Westinghouse's , Babock and Wilcox's despite having built many small nukes for the US Navy (subs,ships), Hyperions, and Sandia's new Right Reactor. Nor is it likely the 30 years running IFR (GE Prism) or the very promising LFTR will be built. Lots of congressmen and Senators are pissed about that there are several bills running through the house trying to make that right.Of course, when you start taking your remedial courses on geography you will find there are lots of places outside the US that use power.

It will likely take some kind of climate disaster to get politicians to act on GHG's.

Little Andrew can't put together a reasoned argument so he calls people he disagrees with shills and threatens to tell his mommy. You can call all those reactor's vaporware if you like but they will be built outside of the US. My use of Hyperion as I have explained to you many times (that reading problem again) is as an illustration of the industrial capacity required. I wouldn't recommend any organization in the US order one at this time (what a shill huh)

I was saddened by your Tourettes acting up again when taking one of your rather puerile shots at thebubonicegg.

Get your remedial ed teacher to help you with web searches. You will find lots of sources on nuclear safety and many of other issues including dare I say etiquette.

The nextbigfuture article I quoted above was an excellent discussion on nuclear plant safety.

There are certainly a lot more dangerous accidents waiting to happen than a nuclear plant accident. One is the million a year deaths from toxic coal plant emissions that you renewable types ignore waiting for the perfect solution to climate change.

There were no injuries from three mile island despite a partial core meltdown and taxpayers in Washington would have been far better off now if those WPPSS reactors had been built.

I didn't realize you had the nerve to comment again on my earlier article. Go on back to it I'll and you'll see I opened another can of whoop ass on ya.

The amount of solar radiation (insolation) in the Northern Hemisphere at 65° N seems to be related to occurrence of an ice age. Astronomical calculations show that 65° N summer insolation should increase gradually over the next 25,000 years. A regime of eccentricity lower than the current value will last for about the next 100,000 years. Changes in Northern Hemisphere summer insolation will be dominated by changes in obliquity ε. No declines in 65° N summer insolation, sufficient to cause an ice age, are expected in the next 50,000 years.

An often-cited 1980 study by Imbrie and Imbrie determined that, "Ignoring anthropogenic and other possible sources of variation acting at frequencies higher than one cycle per 19,000 years, this model predicts that the long-term cooling trend which began some 6,000 years ago will continue for the next 23,000 years."[11]

More recent work by Berger and Loutre suggests that the current warm climate may last another 50,000 years.[12]

The best chances for a decline in Northern hemisphere summer insolation that would be sufficient for triggering an ice age is at 130,000 year or possibly as far out at 620,000 years.[13]

Little Andrew can't put together a reasoned argument so he calls people he disagrees with shills and threatens to tell his mommy. You can call all those reactor's vaporware if you like but they will be built outside of the US. My use of Hyperion as I have explained to you many times (that reading problem again) is as an illustration of the industrial capacity required. I wouldn't recommend any organization in the US order one at this time (what a shill huh)

fwiw, BA's name calling is generally a side-line to his evidence-based arguments, usually explained fairly clearly and with links. Your name-calling appears to cover up a complete lack of evidence. Additionally, all of the 'evidence' you've presented about Hyperion reactors (so far as I've seen it, anyway) is from their sales brochures.

As an illustration of the industrial capacity required, your claims make no sense, unless you can show us parts diagrams of the reactor, and give us some specifics about the tooling in the industrial plants you claim can just start pumping these things out. Otherwise, you're just making claims out of thin air.

OTOH, BA gave you some good evidence that you can't just produce anything at all in an old automobile plant, and gave you some real facts about what the world capacity for high-strength, high-precision, large forgings is: almost nothing. As a refutation of all that, you just repeat your claim that industrial capacity is not a factor.

quote:

sethdayal:I didn't realize you had the nerve to comment again on my earlier article. Go on back to it I'll and you'll see I opened another can of whoop ass on ya.

Frankly, you're the one getting 'whooped' here. But you're also engaging in near-constant ad homs, and haven't written anything new or interesting in several months by my count, so I'm just going to dump you into my ignore list with the other trash. Bye!

Frankly I don't give a damn. You just don't get that I was using the Hyperion as a example of a small chunk of steel and tubing that produces a lot of heat. If the details weren't classified we could have used nuclear sub reactors.

Sethdayal's fantasy is that such a thing exists and can be licensed (meaning safe enough) as a "small chunk of steel and tubing that produces a lot of heat." And of course one might add... at a reasonable cost.

Sethdayal went gaga about lead-bismuth cooled reactors ... because that is what the Hyperion scheme has shifted to... and because he read "The Hunt for Red October." It's weird how when we get to anything climate or energy related, novels become a source of "truth." Once one takes a look at the problems the Soviets had with these reactors ... they aren't so automatically attractive, and in any event the big problem for Hyperion is that they abandoned the "innovative" feature of the original Hyperion concept that might have made it intrinsically safe.

He then switches to "Naval Reactors" when I debunk that ... and Sethdayal and others, just think for a second. Got any idea what a US naval reactor costs and why? While some of the details of these reactors are classified all the principles and the design strategies are known. And here's the real central one: the US naval reactors run on highly-enriched (i.e. "bomb grade") U235. The reason the Oak Ridge separation plant continues to produce high enrichment U235 is solely for the naval reactors, there is no other use for it. (we don't build bombs with it, Plutonium makes a better bomb core.)

There are two reasons for this; the first is that the high enrichment in conjunction with some other design features allow very long refueling lifetimes (which the navy wants for operational reasons), and the second is more fundamental: U235 reactors produce far less afterheat when you scram them. And that's a major, major safety and operability factor. Even given this Naval reactors "cut safety corners" no civilian reactor would be allowed, particularly some sort of "little reactors everywhere unattended" reactor. They are after all, naval weapons.

Now, think for a second ... here's Sethdayal arguing that everybody and their brother and their brother's dog can have a "naval reactor" which has an inventory of several (exact amount classified, but much more than two) CRITICAL MASSES OF BOMB-GRADE U235. And beyond that ... that it will be really cheap, easily industrially produced, "a small chunk of steel and tubing..."

And bluntly... this is INSANE. The real core of the insanity is the belief that somehow there is some nuclear tooth fairy, and that there has been some grand and sweeping world-wide conspiracy so that nobody has it. All the nuclear engineers of all nations must have been engaged in this conspiracy, because NOBODY has it. Instead all the engineers have been conspiring for years and years to build reactors which are monstrously expensive and big and complex (and have safety problems) compared to the "tooth fairy reactor."

Now its two of you that can't read and have a lot of trouble with logical thinking.

Can you get it through your extremely blunted heads that I don't care what reactor you use as an example the industrial capacity is available to build a couple of gigawatts of them daily worldwide.

That I proved beyond all doubt.

The real problem is political. Until Obama is onside like the India government is nothing will happen in the US.

I never once said we should build naval reactors so all that nonsense was just a waste of your time. I did say Babcock and Wilcox has lots of experience building them so their small nuke option would be based on that experience. Apparently Westinghouse, Sandia, Los Alamos and Babcock and Wilcox all have missed your Wikipedia research and have fraudulently used shareholder equity in some kind of stock scam promoting their products.

All your Wikipedia horse pucky, is just that. I don't know what Los Alamos knows about Lead Bismuth reactors and neither do you. Your contention based on Wiki is that they are idiots or fraud artists. I assume you have contacted the authorities based on your expertise.

Originally posted by sethdayal:Can you get it through your extremely blunted heads that I don't care what reactor you use as an example the industrial capacity is available to build a couple of gigawatts of them daily worldwide.

I think this is indicative of what's going on here: you have this idea that "industrial capacity" is some perfectly fungible resource that be diverted from die-cast cars to automobiles to nuclear reactors. Industrial capacity has EVERYTHING to do with WHAT you are building. No, not all reactors are built the same. So yes, it really does matter what kind of reactors you are building.

quote:

That I proved beyond all doubt.

You have shown no such thing. If automotive manufacturing capacity could be arbitrarily diverted as you seem to think, then Detroit would be rolling in dough. They would simply lease out their "capacity" to whatever industry needed it at the moment. That doesn't happen. Take a look at this list of former automotive manufacturing plants. Note how few of them are re purposed for manufacturing and then almost invariably to aeronautics applications, which (to my admittedly weak understanding) has a decent overlap with automotives in terms of tooling requirements. I'm basing this primarily on the historically strong connections between automotive and aeronautic manufacturing companies (GE, Volvo, Rolls Royce etc.).

Originally posted by Glaucus:You have shown no such thing. If automotive manufacturing capacity could be arbitrarily diverted as you seem to think, then Detroit would be rolling in dough. They would simply lease out their "capacity" to whatever industry needed it at the moment. That doesn't happen. Take a look at this list of former automotive manufacturing plants. Note how few of them are re purposed for manufacturing and then almost invariably to aeronautics applications, which (to my admittedly weak understanding) has a decent overlap with automotives in terms of tooling requirements. I'm basing this primarily on the historically strong connections between automotive and aeronautic manufacturing companies (GE, Volvo, Rolls Royce etc.).

That's a cogent counter-argument to Sethdayal, but I'm afraid it doesn't address the real problem... the miracle reactor Sethdayal believes in is something we don't know how to engineer, and have pretty strong evidence cannot be engineered or produced to deliver what he thinks is possible.

He claims it is "easy" ... because he simply has no understanding of the actual issues of nuclear engineering. Each time he picks some "example" it becomes immediately clear that either his "example" is fantasyware or it's inconceivable that it would actually be replicated in the numbers he is suggesting and distributed to the public (US naval reactors).

The device he wants is an extremely HARD problem at any price, due to the safety/reliability constraints in long term, widely distributed, completely unattended operation in large numbers. People have proposed ideas, some considerably more crackpot than others, some "sane" in the sense that they don't violate physics. But no such thing actually has been demonstrated, or licensed.

Once a design which could be sold has been demonstrated and licensed, then one could talk about costs, economies of scale, etc.

But until then it's completely arguing about vaporware, makes no sense to talk about how many you can build, when you haven't demonstrated you can make ONE.